As the world sought to digest the frightening news from San Bernardino last Wednesday, a consensus swiftly arose on social media arguing that the shooters were most likely of ‘Caucasian’ descent. They were wrong, it turns out, very wrong, but their presumption is nonetheless easy to explain.
From Columbine High to West Nickel Mines, Jokela High to Northern Illinois University, Sandy Hook to Lindhurst High, a frightening and probably disproportionate number of gun massacres are committed by young White men.
Why are they doing this? It’s a question that Leftists and Islam-panderers love to ask after shooting events like that at Planned Parenthood. They think (but are mistaken in thinking) that this will absolve Islam of its violent reputation, or that it will ‘put things into context’ with something like the same effect. “Perhaps Islamists are just the Middle East’s jerks, and school-shooters are America’s jerks? Perhaps we both have the same jerk-minority” etc… This is bullcrap, of course. Even if we entertained such logic, what would it make of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are merely sympathetic to the Jerks – ‘Jerk-sympathisers’? ‘Ideological Jerks’? What would it make of the Islamic God who recommends such jerkish actions in the first place?
But apart from liberal mischief, the question is nonetheless valid and must be answered. Why are mass-shooters usually White? Could it be that White people are more violent generally than non-Whites?
No, it couldn’t possibly be that. African and Hispanic Americans commit crimes at a far (far) greater rate than American Whites do, and yet there have been very few Hispanic or Black mass-shootings in recent US history.
Are Whites in thrall to an extremist ideology of some kind – like Nazism or White supremacism etc..? No, not really. While membership of far-right organisations in America continues to grow (having been given new life after the election of Barack Obama), the proportion of Whites interested in head-shaving, dressing up in hooded pyjamas or saluting with an outstretched arm is tiny overall, and wouldn’t even make for a single percentage point.
What can it be then? The answer I believe involves the great unspoken, unexamined crisis of the modern world – namely, the dire condition of the White working class.
White decline as a phenomenon is not limited to America, and nor is (or will be) the fallout from it. Rather, it affects every European-majority nation on the planet. In England, America, Canada, Germany and elsewhere, White working class communities are falling into social disrepair and economic oblivion. With the death of Western manufacturing (due to China’s monopoly on exports), the growth of prescription drug abuse, and the academic impacts of mass immigration (especially from Asian nations), White working class men are finding it impossible to compete, to find a place for themselves in modern society.
If that weren’t bad enough, working class Whites find themselves the butt of popular culture. In Hollywood, satirical cartoons and internet memes alike, White working class men are portrayed as idiotic, aggressive, overdosed on religion and habitually racist towards all other social groups.
None of that could possibly excuse the kind of random cruelty under examination, but the context is nonetheless screaming out to be understood. A young white male – say, 16 years old – today, has a future of nothing but decline to look forward to. He is aware of the lofty position his race enjoyed until very recently. And the fall – as well as the corresponding rise of ethnic competitors – hurts. Blacks are stronger, faster and cooler. Asians are smarter. Hispanics are more numerous. etc… And all such minority groups are openly celebrated in the media, with only Whites left to construct pride out of nothing.
While there is a still a White power class, fat with wealth and armed with influence, the White ‘community’ itself has torn in two, with the White elite flying away into a cosmopolitan world of champagne and racial ambiguity. University-educated Whites care more about Tibetans than Texans; Palestinians more than Minnesotans. Poor Whites have literally no-one to protect them apart from gun-manufacturers, other disenfranchised Whites and the tattiest extreme of the Republican party.
The social condition of working class Whites is beginning to have shocking results quite apart from rates of crime. A report published last month (which stunned the medical community) revealed that mortality rates among poor whites are not diminishing (as in all other cases) but rapidly increasing. Addressing these findings The Atlantic magazine noted: “All-cause mortality among middle-aged Americans with a high-school degree or less increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2013, but there was little change in mortality for people with some college (education). The death rate for the college-educated fell slightly.” Elsewhere the same article added the “reasons for the increased death rate are not the usual things that kill Americans, like diabetes and heart disease. Rather, it’s suicide, alcohol and drug poisonings, and alcohol-related liver disease.”
The ‘drug poisonings’ referred to in that quotation are part of a much larger epidemic of Heroin, Benzodiazepine and Oxycodone abuse in White American communities. The New York Times reported that “prior to the 1980s, whites and non-whites were equally represented among first-time heroin users. But that’s changed as heroin use has expanded across other parts of the country… Now, nearly 90 percent of the people who tried heroin for the first time in the past decade were white.”
Here in England, White working class decline is most noticeable in the field of education. Numerous reports (the most recent study was published earlier this year) have revealed a massive and still growing disparity in academic achievement between poor Whites and those from foreign backgrounds. Martin Beckford wrote in the Telegraph that “only 48 per cent of the poorest white boys met (government) targets in English and maths at primary school last year, compared with 82 per cent of Chinese pupils…This makes it less likely they will go on to university or well-paid jobs, and has consequences for their own children. The National Audit Office has claimed that white working-class boys are “‘significantly under-represented in higher education'”.
In October this year, the same newspaper reported that “White boys from poor backgrounds have the lowest attainment levels at GCSE (compared to) any other social or ethnic group… Just 28.3 per cent of white boys who were eligible for free school meals (Note: a significant signifier of poverty in the UK) achieved five GCSEs at grade A to C.”
Reacting to a different report with the same findings, Claire Crawford, an academic at Warwick University was quoted in the Guardian as saying: “We were particularly surprised to find that ethnic minority groups which have relatively low school attainment, such as those of black Caribbean, Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnic origin, are, on average, more likely to continue into higher education than white British pupils.”
White decline of this kind is a precondition for White nihilism, the rejection of society and all its boundaries and values. If you allow a community to be poked at, robbed of hope and then left entirely to its own devices, the consequences can be shocking. I am not excusing violence. But in a world in which we rush to examine the societal causes of all wrong-doing by minorities, we should sometimes do the same for the majority as well.
D, LDN
Defend the Modern World 